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the Garlic Gallery

Emerging garlic on March 31, 2010

Hello garlic lovers. I would like to tell you a little bit about my love affair with the stinking rose and update my comments from November 2009.

Only a part of our 2010 garlic was mulched last fall. This has afforded an interesting glimpse into the rate of emergence of our different varieties as spring progresses. Chinese Purple is always up first, mulched or not. It just wants to go and grow. My remaining inventory of this Artichoke sub-variety was sprouting by January and reminds me that garlic is a living, breathing, life sustaining food.

You might have heard the advice to only plant the largest cloves; so what do you do with all the leftover small ones? Of course you could keep them to eat, but garlic stores best as whole bulbs with intact wrappers. I came across a suggestion about green garlic while browsing the ‘net. Why not plant the little ones for early harvest as garlic scallions? I tried it last year with excellent results. Here’s my procedure:

I prepare a trench the same way I do for evenly spaced (4-6”) large cloves, but I just sprinkle the small cloves randomly into the trench without regard to orientation, with a very rough 2-3” spacing. Small bulbs get planted whole. It goes very fast and supplies our shareholders with fresh garlic in April and May that we use just like scallions. The developing cloves will eventually show the first sign of their skin which I find tough and tedious to remove, so I recommend harvesting and using green garlic by mid May.

In the photo above you can see how closely spaced the garlic scallions are in the two rows on the right. They'll be in our salads and stir frys within a month!

I did not note the individual’s name (or the farm) who wrote about planting small cloves for garlic scallions, but if you happen to be reading this…Thanks!!!

On September 26 and 27, we attended the Hudson Valley Garlic Fest in Saugerties, NY (http://hvgf.org/) for the first time. 19,000 garlic lovers attended this event on Saturday alone. We particularly enjoyed the Saturday night Grower’s Potluck, where we were introduced to the fellowship of garlic fanatics and their secret recipes.

Now, a little about the Asbury Village Farm varieties. In the fall of 2002, we bought seed stock from Filaree Farm. Tom recommended two Rocamboles, Killarney Red and Carpathian, as well as a Purple Stripe called Persian Star. These are hardneck garlics (sativuum ophioscorodon). They all grew well in our gravelly loam and Zone VI temperatures. In 2004 we ordered the Chinese Purple and Brown Tempest, and bought some Porcelain from Billie and Skip Fairman in Nazareth. The Purple really struggled to get through the mulch but did well the following year.

Reading about softneck garlics (sativuum sativuum) and their longkeeping properties, I asked Tom for a suggestion and we planted the Inchelium Red in 2005. It proved to be remarkably vigorous. Here are some observations about each of our eight garlics:

The Rocamboles

I have had a hard time distinguishing between the Killarney Red and the Carpathian. Sometimes I can see a little color difference in the stalks. Although the Killarney Red was really super-sized in 2007, they tend to produce very similar bulbs in size and color.

The Purple Stripes

The Persian Star, although not large in size, is consistently hardy and hot. The Brown Tempest is a Glazed Purple Stripe and in our soil produces a handsome, dusky brown, medium size bulb.

Porcelain

I call this one Fairman White since it had an undetermined provenance. It is the cleanest in appearance and consistently large. Porcelains only produce 4-6 cloves per bulb and this one is on the mild side.

Inchelium Red

These bright white Artichoke bulbs can get large. The three inch diameter specimen I entered in the 2006 Warren County Farmer's Fair won first place. Their stalks fall over just before harvest and make amply clear the term softneck.

Chinese Purple

This Artichoke sub-variety is my favorite. It needed coaxing to adapt to our growing conditions, but this year it performed very nicely with the most amazing purple splotching on the wrappers. The stalks are weak and produce few scapes (more about these later). I think of it as sort of a hermaphrodite, half hardneck and half softneck. In storage, these guys want to grow really early and seem to be the first to sprout.

NEW for 2009: Nootka Rose (not pictured)
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, not too far from the west coast of Vancouver Island, home to the Nootka First Nation. I was intrigued by the garlic of the same name in the Filaree Farms catalog and wanted to grow some for friends who live in the NW. This is an heirloom Silverskin (our first!) originally supplied by Steve Bensel on Waldron Island. In our first year of propagation, it yielded an astounding seven fold return on the planting stock.

I have learned how critical harvest timing is. Since the wrappers can rot very quickly, getting the bulbs out of the ground should be done sooner rather than later. As a result, the crop reveals a lot more color because when you clean the bulbs you aren't peeling away the outer wrappers where the color resides.

April 3, 2010

Care to comment? curt.rowell@nrinet.com